Seraphina (27 page)

It opened. I held my breath.

Fruit Bat peeked around the edge. I quailed. He had been so well behaved since I’d asked him to that I’d almost forgotten there’d been any trouble. Seeing him outside the garden scared me, though. I could not help but think of Jannoula, with all her peeking and prying, and how she’d practically set up housekeeping in my head.

Fruit Bat’s face lit up when he saw me. He seemed incurious about my private mind; he had merely been looking for
me
. To my horror, I was naked in my own head; I changed that with a thought.

“You found me,” I said, smoothing my imaginary gown, or reassuring myself that it was there. “I know, I haven’t been to the garden tonight. I—I couldn’t face it. I’m tired of having to tend it. I’m tired of—of being this.”

He held out his wiry brown hands.

I considered the offer but could not bring myself to induce a vision. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Everything feels so heavy right now, and …” I could not continue.

I was going to have to shut him out. I did not see how I could muster the strength to do it.

He hugged me; he was short, not even up to my shoulder. I held him, put my cheek against the soft, dark knots of his hair, and wept. Then somehow, and I’m not sure how, I slept.

Kiggs was woefully cheerful for a man who could not have gotten more than four hours’ sleep. I had taken my time with the morning routine, assuming we’d be off to a slow start, but he had arrived at the Queen’s study ahead of me, dressed in dull colors like a peasant. No one would have mistaken him for a peasant up close, however; the cut of his jerkin was too fine, his woolens too soft, his smile too bright.

A man hulked beside him; I realized with a start that it was Lars. “He was asking for you last night after you absconded,” said Kiggs as I drew near. “I told him he could catch you this morning before we left.”

Lars reached inside his black jerkin and pulled out a large, folded parchment. “I hev designedt it lest night, and want you to hev it, Mistress Dombegh, because I hev no other goodt way of … to thank you.” He handed it to me with a little flourish, and then, surprisingly quickly for such a large man, disappeared up the hallway.

“What is it?” said Kiggs.

The parchment fluttered as I spread it out. It looked like schematics for some sort of machine, although I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Kiggs had a more concrete notion: “A ballista?”

He was reading over my shoulder; his breath smelled of anise.

I said, “What’s a ballista?”

“Like a catapult, but it flings spears. But this one flings … what is that?”

It looked like a harpoon with a bladder full of something unspecified. “I don’t think I want to know,” I said. It looked like a giant clyster pipe, for delivering a dragon’s colonic, but I didn’t care to say that aloud before a prince of the realm, bastard or no.

“Stow it in here,” he said, handing me a saddle pack, which appeared to contain our lunch. “You’re dressed warmly enough to ride?”

I hoped so. I’d never actually ridden a horse, being a city girl, but I’d scrounged up a pair of Porphyrian trousers and wore my usual overabundance of layers.

I had Orma’s earring fastened by a cord around my neck. I could feel the cold lump of it if I put my hand to my heart.

We set off through the palace, down corridors, through a door concealed behind a tapestry, and down into a series of passages I’d never seen. Stairs took us below the level of the basements, through a rough tunnel. We passed three locked doors, which Kiggs conscientiously relocked behind us while I held the lantern. We were going roughly west, according to my internal compass. Past a pair of enormous stone doors, the tunnel broadened into a natural cave system; Kiggs avoided the smaller branches, taking the widest, flattest route each time, until we reached the mouth of a cave in the hillside below the western wall of the castle.

The broad valley of the Mews River spread before us, cloaked in morning mist. Thick clouds hid the face of the sky. Kiggs paused, arms akimbo, taking in the vista. “This was a sally port in war times, invisible from below. We saved ourselves a trip through the city, see? There’s a stable at the base of the hill; we’ve horses waiting there.”

The dusty cave floor had been recently disturbed. “Who uses these caves now?”

“Uncle Rufus, rest he in the bosom of Allsaints, used this route to go hunting. I thought it couldn’t hurt to retrace his steps. No one else uses it that I’m aware of.” He looked at me; I gestured toward some discarded clothing behind a rock. “Hm! Shepherds taking shelter from a storm?” He lifted one item, a well-made but simple gown. Every woman in the palace owned a couple like it; I know I did. “Serving girls meeting their lovers? But how would they get through three locked doors, and why would they leave clothing behind?”

“It is peculiar.”

He grinned. “If this is the biggest mystery we encounter today, I’ll call us lucky.” He refolded the gown and placed it back behind the rock. “You’re perceptive. You may wish to keep that skill at the ready: the slope is rocky, and it’s likely to be wet.”

As we picked our way downhill, I found myself breathing easier. The air was clean and empty; the atmosphere of city and court seemed dense by comparison, saturated with troubles and heavy with worries. There were only two of us out here under the weightless, unbounded sky, and I sighed with relief, noticing for the first time how claustrophobic I had been.

Horses were, indeed, waiting for us. Kiggs had apparently sent word that he was riding with a woman, because my horse was fitted with a little sideways basket seat, complete with footrest. This struck me as far more sensible than the usual setup. Kiggs, however, was unhappy with it. “John!” he cried. “This won’t do! We need proper tack!”

The old ostler frowned. “Sharpey told me you was riding out with the princess.”

“No, Sharpey did not tell you that! You assumed that. Maid Dombegh expects to control her own horse, not be led around on a pony!” He turned to me apologetically, but something in my face stopped him short. “You do intend to ride?”

“Oh yes,” I said, resigned to it now. I hoisted the hem of my skirts to show how I was ready with the Porphyrian trousers and all. He blinked at me, and I realized that had been a most unladylike action—but wasn’t he setting me up to ride in an unladylike way? I couldn’t seem to behave properly, no matter what I did.

Maybe that meant I could stop fretting about it so much.

They brought out my refitted horse; I hitched up my skirts and mounted on the first try, not wanting anyone grabbing me around the waist to help me up. The horse turned in a circle. I’d never done this, but I knew the theory, and it wasn’t long before I had her moving in a straight line, in almost the correct direction.

Kiggs caught me up. “Eager to get going? You left without your saddle pack.”

I managed to stop my horse and hold her almost still while he secured my bags, and then we were off. My horse had definite ideas about where we should go; she liked the look of the water meadows ahead and thought we couldn’t get there fast enough. I tried to hold her back and let Kiggs lead, but she was quite determined. “What’s beyond that leat?” I called back to him, as if I had some notion where we were going.

“The fens where Uncle Rufus was found,” he said, craning his neck to look. “We can stop there, although I doubt the Guard missed much.”

My horse slowed as we approached the little canal; she wanted the water meadow, not the brambly bog. I gestured to the prince to take the lead, as if I were slowing on purpose. My horse tried to turn away from the bridge. “No you don’t,” I muttered to her. “Why should you play the coward? You outweigh all of us.”

Kiggs trotted ahead, his dun cloak flapping behind him. He sat lightly in the saddle, and his horse seemed to respond to his very thoughts; there was none of this unseemly yanking of reins that I was forced to do. He led us off the road almost immediately on the other side of the leat. The fen was relatively dry this time of year; what standing water there was had frozen into a glassy crust that crunched underhoof. I still managed to find a muddy patch where my horse’s hooves skidded and sucked. “Steer her toward the grasses,” Kiggs advised, but my horse, smarter than me, was already headed that way.

Kiggs paused beside some barren shrubbery and pointed to the hills north of us, black with winter trees. “They were hunting in the Queenswood, there. His courtiers claim the hounds scattered—”

“And the hunters scattered after them?”

“No, no, that’s not how it works. The hounds are supposed to investigate all leads; they’re bred for independence. They follow a scent to the end, and if it doesn’t lead to anything useful, they return to the pack. That’s what they’re for, so the hunters don’t have to follow every dead end in the forest.”

“But the Earl of Apsig said Prince Rufus had followed his hounds.”

Kiggs stared at me. “You questioned him about that day?”

The earl had required no interrogation; he’d been bragging to the ladies-in-waiting at the Blue Salon. Kiggs had walked in on that conversation, in fact, but apparently he had missed the discussion of hounds. It seemed I had a reputation as a shrewd investigator to uphold, however, so I said, “Of course.”

Kiggs shook his head in wonderment, and I felt immediately guilty. “They’re supposing that my uncle took off after his prize hound, Una, because he got separated from the group and nobody saw where he went. But he had no reason to do that. She knows what she’s doing.”

“Then why did he leave the group?”

“We may never know,” said Kiggs, spurring his horse a little further along. “Here’s where they found him—with Una’s help—the next morning, beside this rivulet.”

There was little to see, no blood, no sign of struggle. Even the hoofprints of the Guard had been obscured by rain and filled in with seeping fen water. There was a rather deep water-filled crater, and I wondered whether that was where the prince had lain. It was not dramatically Rufus-shaped.

Kiggs dismounted and reached into the pouch at his belt, drawing out a Saint’s medallion, tarnished with use and age. Disregarding the mud, he knelt by the water and held the medallion reverently to his lips, muttering as if to fill it with prayers. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying fervently but also trying to stave off tears. I felt for him; I loved my uncle too. What would I do if he were gone? I was a poor excuse for pious, but I cast a prayer up anyway, to any Saint who might catch it:
Hold Rufus in your arms. Watch over all uncles. Bless this prince
.

Kiggs rose, surreptitiously wiping his eyes, and cast the medallion into the pool. The cold wind tossed his hair the wrong way across his head; the medallion’s ripples disappeared among choppy little waves.

It suddenly occurred to me to think like a dragon. Could a dragon have sat right here in broad daylight, killing someone without being seen? Absolutely not. I could see the road and the city in the distance. Nothing obscured that view at all.

I turned to Kiggs, who was already looking at me, and said, “If a dragon did it, your uncle must have been killed somewhere else and moved here.”

“That’s exactly what I think.” He glanced up at the sky, which was beginning to spit drizzle at us. “We need to get moving, or we’re going to get drenched.”

He mounted his horse and led us out of the fen, back to the high, dry road. He took the north fork, toward the rolling hills of the Queenswood; we passed through just the southern corner of that vast forest. It had a reputation for being dark, but we saw daylight the entire time, black branches dividing the gray sky into panes, like the lead cames of a cathedral window. It began to drizzle harder and colder.

Over the third ridge, the forest turned into coppice, the rolling hills into sinkholes and ravines. Kiggs slowed his horse. “This seems a more likely area for a dragon to kill someone. Coppice is thinner than forest, so it could maneuver adequately, if not well. It’d be concealed down one of the hollows, unseen until one was right on top of it.”

“You think Prince Rufus stumbled upon the rogue dragon by accident?”

Kiggs shrugged. “If a dragon really killed him, that seems likely. Any dragon intending to assassinate Prince Rufus could find a hundred easier ways to do it without raising suspicions against dragons. If it were me, I’d infiltrate the court, gain the prince’s trust, lure him into the forest, and put an arrow through the back of his skull. Call it a hunting accident—or disappear. None of this messy biting off of heads.”

Kiggs sighed. “I was convinced it was the Sons of St. Ogdo before the knights came to us. Now I don’t know what to think.”

A noise had been growing at the edge of my perception, a chittering like locusts in summer. It grew loud enough now that I noticed it. “What’s that sound?”

Kiggs paused to listen. “That would be the column of rooks, I assume. There’s an immense rookery in a ravine north of here. The birds are so numerous there’s always a flight of them above the place, visible from miles away. Here, I’ll show you.”

He steered his horse off the path, through the coppice, up the ridge; I followed. From the top we saw, half a mile off, a lazy cloud of black birds, hovering, swooping all together. There must have been thousands for us to hear their cries this far away.